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escape artist
Sep 24, 2005

Slow train coming
You ready to turn this thread into a bestselling book in the vain of Sepinwall's Soprano Sessions, Jerusalem?

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Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

escape artist posted:

You ready to turn this thread into a bestselling book in the vain of Sepinwall's Soprano Sessions, Jerusalem?

Had an argument with a publishing house about this the other day, happened to get it on film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05wJaKtciH0&t=19s

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy
"We gonna beat you longer and harder than you beat your own dick"

Season 3 starts off strong.

e: "D'yall yknow yuh ain't got pants?"

algebra testes fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jan 26, 2019

zjentohlauedy
Feb 27, 2006

Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seem to have forgotten good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow w

escape artist posted:

I know, but I mean, does any still have it or can they find it so I can do just that?

Was it this one from the wiki page?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Mouzone

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

There used to be a website that you could put your username into and it would retrieve your old avatar for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore :(

Kevyn
Mar 5, 2003

I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.
You used to be able to look at the URL of your avatar and change the number at the end to bring up your old ones. Like mine is “title-kevyn-7.jpg”, if you change the 7 to a 6, 5, 4, etc, you can see my old avatars.

It still works for me, but probably because I haven’t changed my avatar in over 10 years. They must have changed how they are stored since then and it doesn’t work for those of you with newer avs.

escape artist
Sep 24, 2005

Slow train coming
I found it. Had to use the way way back machine.


zjentohlauedy, it was close, but not quite.

https://imgur.com/YTwk011

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Hey escape artist, I know it has been a long time, but do you think you could add the link to the final write-up to the OP?

Episode 10 - –30– - Part One
Episode 10 - –30– - Part Two

Asbury
Mar 23, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 6 years!
Hair Elf

Jerusalem posted:

Hey escape artist, I know it has been a long time

lol, five years almost to the day since the last edit to the OP. (And 7 since the thread started. gently caress).

welcome back ea!

goodog
Nov 3, 2007

Dongattack posted:

I'm rewatching the show for like the 11th time i'm sure, but it's a really complicated show so every time i do i catch something i'd missed or don't understand. How come (in season 1) Barksdale &co gave money to politicians? Money laundering in some way? Bribes? But bribes for what?

In Sudhir Venkatesh's* Gang Leader For A Day, Chicago gang leaders in the 80s had to pay bribes to local politicians and aldermen in order to keep operating in public housing towers. It helps avoid attention from the police and H.U.D. Like castles, the power of the Barksdale Organisation came from their control of the high-rise and low-rise projects. The demolition in S3 mirrors the collapse of "corporate " style drug dealers who ran massive organizations out of inner-city projects.

The money is also laundered back into local community centres and events. It served the interests of both drug gangs and local politicians to acts as substitutes for the lack of public services. Funding boxing gyms, picnics, child care etc. is cheap PR.

* Sudhir is the guy who watched S5 of The Wire with a group of veteran gangsters.

ruddiger
Jun 3, 2004

made this for cspam but it's thread relevant.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Just starting S4 right now, and I wanted to note my amusement at seeing that Bubs has a concession stand.

That is all

pokeyman
Nov 26, 2006

That elephant ate my entire platoon.
I think you mean "has a depo"

escape artist
Sep 24, 2005

Slow train coming

Data Graham posted:

Just starting S4 right now, and I wanted to note my amusement at seeing that Bubs has a concession stand.

That is all

Anxious to hear the rest of your S4 thoughts!

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Yeah, especially in regards to the kids but also how that particular season wraps up.

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy
Just watched Generation Kill and that too is very good

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Don't sleep on Show Me A Hero, it's a fantastic show as well.

Plus of course The Deuce, which is great and will end with its next season.

Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!
I dare say this David Simon character knows a thing or two about making good TV shows.

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy

Orange Devil posted:

I dare say this David Simon character knows a thing or two about making good TV shows.

Show Me a Hero and The Deuce really corrected that Treme trajectory his career had.

And the Treme isn't bad either it's just not The Wire.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



escape artist posted:

Anxious to hear the rest of your S4 thoughts!

It seems to me like it's kind of not the sort of show that's super easy to have commentary on in the middle, when everything is still slowly playing out. This sort of pure-drama series is a bit of a new experience for me, coming from being used to its descendants which mixed in a lot more humor and quirkiness like Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul / Preacher / etc. which all have explosive reveals and crowd-pleasing moments sprinkled throughout for the audience to go :tviv: over. With The Wire, it's more like a 13-hour movie, and I don't wanna talk in the middle of the movie, if that makes sense?

That said, S4 so far is giving out some good rewards even halfway through. Prez is getting a handle on teaching (none too soon, just in time for the kids to get in poo poo), the lovely lieutenant has had some theatrically hilarious failures due to his incompetence/hubris (that honestly felt like they were out of some kind of 80s farce), Hauk has been getting stupider with every passing scene, and Carcetti just won.

The mayoral race thing, though, brings up something I've been trying to get a grasp on with the show since day one, which is "wtf is it trying to do with race". I'm not sure why I should be being asked to root for this whiny white guy who complains to the camera every chance he gets about being a white guy in a majority-black city, woe is him. Certainly this of all shows is not going to be vulnerable to charges of being openly racist considering how rich and broad the spectrum of characters is and how sympathetic they are once you know all their stories, but this mayor's race thing is giving me the same weird feeling I got from Hamsterdam last season, which devolved into bestial anarchy so quickly it felt like the show was trying to do some kind of Birth of a Nation poo poo. Like is this just a character thing showing where Colvin's well-intentioned bad judgment leads him, or is it saying this radical idea he had is doomed to fail and therefore the only answer is just do more futile police poo poo for a thousand years?

The show also says a lot to me about the nature of careerism and how fortunate I am to personally be in an industry where if I don't like my job I can just fuckin leave and get another one. These cops who work for 20, 30 years and then retire or are fired and find out they have no idea how to do anything else .... I mean I guess that's actually how most of the world works, isn't it. Colvin's story being presented in parallel to Cutty's, where the one is just flopping around at a loss until he gets involved with the corner kids at the school, is pretty stark since Cutty's competence and success at running his boxing gym (seemingly to his own surprise) and having all the moms mack on him seems to be saying something about how even being a prison lifer is less of a career-killer than being a cop.

It's been kinda fun seeing Marlo playing Hauk and friends like fiddles, turning the whole premise of the show on its head (lol video). He's not been as fun a character to watch as Stringer/Avon so far, and I'm hoping this is the spot where that starts to turn around.

I get the feeling Omar's story hasn't got a lot further to go, and it's not going to end well :smith:

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Why do you think you’re meant to root for Carcetti?

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



I mean, I'm hoping I'm not, and the fact that he's already won and the season's only half over is probably the biggest clue poo poo's going down.

(Direct answer: because pervasive POV I guess) (And also his campaign manager dude is pretty awesome) (Lemme guess, he turns out to be horrible)

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Escobarbarian posted:

Why do you think you’re meant to root for Carcetti?

I don't wanna spoil anything for Data Graham as they're currently in the midst of watching it, but yeah Carcetti is designed to appear in a very particular surface level way and then - like 90% of The Wire and its characters - we get to see layers peel away at the person beneath, which is really fascinating (and often infuriating) to watch.

Carcetti is a pretty incredible character, he parallels McNulty in some ways as The Wire taking a pretty well-worn trope - in Carcetti's case the young crusading politician, in McNulty's the maverick cop who plays by his own rules but gets the job done etc - and showing just how that would work (or not) in the "real" world, and particularly how they would clash with other characters.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
I mean by the end of season 3 you’ve already seen more than enough to know the show doesn’t see him as a good character, right? I mean the mirror sex scene alone

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Narcissism is hardly a kiss of death in and of itself in a show where literally every character is flawed and which seems to be keen to rehabilitate fuckin Landsman

There's kind of a fine line between "nobody is actually good or evil, there's reasons behind why everyone does everything" and "OK this thing that Character A did, ain't no defense of that" — in this show as well as in life

MrBling
Aug 21, 2003

Oozing machismo
Jay Landsman is pure and good. He doesn't need rehabilitating.

He's basically the only character in the entire series that has risen as far he knows he should and he's perfectly content with staying there.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

MrBling posted:

Jay Landsman is pure and good. He doesn't need rehabilitating.

He's basically the only character in the entire series that has risen as far he knows he should and he's perfectly content with staying there.

That may be, but he(and others like him)still helps prop up an incredibly flawed police department, and he's more self aware than a lot of the others. So yea he's just a cog in a machine but it's a pretty horrific machine and he doesn't seem to have much of a problem with that. He's happy to sit there every day reading his porno mags as long as the stats are what the department wants them to be, and the damage to the community that philosophy causes isn't lost on Landsman. He's just stopped caring.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Escobarbarian posted:

I mean by the end of season 3 you’ve already seen more than enough to know the show doesn’t see him as a good character, right? I mean the mirror sex scene alone

i love that they had to say that carcetti's affairs were something they made up for the show and not based on actual rumors about o'malley. "yeah you didn't actually cheat on your wife, you just seem like the kind of guy who'd bang a random woman at a fundraiser while staring at yourself in a mirror"

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe
The thing with Carcetti is that his narcissism doesn't mean his intentions weren't good initially. Because of his narcissism, he thought he, Thomas Carcetti, was the only person capable of fixing the city's problems. He thought of himself as this transformative, once in a generation political figure that was going to make huge changes in the world.

That's what makes him interesting and extremely realistic. Because he thinks nobody can do the things that he can, he decides that it's ok to compromise certain things to gain ground on other things. He makes horrible sacrifices for selfish outcomes, but he doesn't see it as selfish because in his mind he's doing what's necessary for "the big picture". And to him the big picture is that he'll one day be President and have the power to right all the wrongs of the world. He's a great example of how someone can do bad things for ultimately the right reasons, and how little that matters to the people who have to directly experience the negative consequences of those decisions.

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

Basebf555 posted:

He's a great example of how someone can do bad things for ultimately the right reasons, and how little that matters to the people who have to directly experience the negative consequences of those decisions.
as is bubbles, with sherrod

Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

awesmoe posted:

as is bubbles, with sherrod

Bubbles did nothing wrong.

Bubbles is the hero of The Wire, and he wins.

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

Addamere posted:

Bubbles did nothing wrong.

Bubbles is the hero of The Wire, and he wins.
bubbles stole pretty much constantly, and killed (not murdered) sherrod, and got the poo poo beaten out of other fiends through his actions (when they got blamed for his thefts), and got that pastor harassed by the cops by calling herc on him.
so he was a fairly standard hardcore dope fiend, and him managing to get clean feels earned and real because of that.

denzelcurrypower
Jan 28, 2011
Dukie's ending in the finale basically made me cry. What a hard hitting montage.

Hasselblad
Dec 13, 2017

My dumbass opinions are only outweighed by my racism.

No one forgot that I exist to defend violent cops, champion chaining down immigrants, and have trash opinions on cooking.

Basebf555 posted:

That may be, but he(and others like him)still helps prop up an incredibly flawed police department, and he's more self aware than a lot of the others. So yea he's just a cog in a machine but it's a pretty horrific machine and he doesn't seem to have much of a problem with that. He's happy to sit there every day reading his porno mags as long as the stats are what the department wants them to be, and the damage to the community that philosophy causes isn't lost on Landsman. He's just stopped caring.

Landsman is murder po lice. What philosophy are you speaking of that causes community damage? He doesn’t want the stats at a specific level, he wants them solved as often as possible. Sometimes that means passing over virtually unsolvable cases in order to close reasonable ones, or the red balls. It is triage.

In the book I suspect he is the character who allows his detectives to do their jobs in a more hands off approach, as the people in homicide earned their way into the job and are very good at it.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Thru s4e10, and god drat Hauk sucks. Would have thought he'd grab any excuse to not walk into the "we need to talk" "where to begin?" office from Fight Club, and a call from Bubbs to come save him from the predator seems like something he'd leap for. Instead now both of them are hosed

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

Hasselblad posted:

Landsman is murder po lice. What philosophy are you speaking of that causes community damage? He doesn’t want the stats at a specific level, he wants them solved as often as possible. Sometimes that means passing over virtually unsolvable cases in order to close reasonable ones, or the red balls. It is triage.

In the book I suspect he is the character who allows his detectives to do their jobs in a more hands off approach, as the people in homicide earned their way into the job and are very good at it.

I think your description of his thought process when it comes to the cases is very generous. I wouldn't call it "triage", I'd call it "covering your rear end". His primary concern is that his unit's clearance rate stays above a certain number, and he's willing to look the other way on potential cases if it means one less open case at the end of the year on the stat sheet.

Of course I'm not saying he's all bad, as with most Wire characters there are also positive aspects to his character. But he's certainly not unambiguously good and noble.

ruddiger
Jun 3, 2004

Escobarbarian posted:

I mean by the end of season 3 you’ve already seen more than enough to know the show doesn’t see him as a good character, right? I mean the mirror sex scene alone

I kinda felt the same way Reg E. Cathey felt at the end of the season. He was Carcetti's number 2 and I think because he kept the faith, so did I, and his moment of realization while sitting in the bar watching the election results and that Carcetti was just another pretender mirrored my own.

MrBling
Aug 21, 2003

Oozing machismo

Addamere posted:

Bubbles did nothing wrong.

Bubbles is the hero of The Wire, and he wins.

I think you'll find that Donut is the true hero of the people.

Harold Stassen
Jan 24, 2016
I was surprised by many of the deaths in The Wire but was confounded most ultimately by Bubbles' continuing to live :unsmith:

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algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy
Season 3 rewatch still going.

"Who's your dog" still cracks me up.

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